What interesting times we live in

I think about what is going on in the world and wonder how I will ever be able to explain this to my son. We have a recession, our parents went through one or more already; the US is involved in 2 wars, my dad fought in one. The next American president is more tanned than his predecessors, we nearly had a woman president… My parents never had anything like that. We are going through tough times, and the worse is yet to come. Yet I find myself somehow sheltered from all this. I have a job, which I am hoping to keep for at least a year or so, but then who can really be sure. I am very lucky, I do not fight in Irak, I did not know anyone in the twin tours. And yet I find myself somewhat involved, I suppose at this point it is more of an intellectual exercise and my parents would probably laugh on how sheltered my life still is.

Somehow though, I still feel the pain I see in the world. It is hard to ignore, bad news get spread because they sell and no-one really care about good news. Everyday, something bad happens somewhere, it is hard to ignore it and not be affected. I am in no way feeling directly as my parents did, I am so much more sheltered than they were. I am hoping that my son will be as well sheltered as I have been of course. Life throws enough at all of us to gain some perspective. But how will I be able to explain the significance of the events we are currently going through. A black president will be something common, maybe it will have the same significance as ‘one man, one vote’ for me. How can see how good it is, but I can only imagine the impact the right to vote was for those who did not have it.

The next question I will hope he will have would be ‘What can I do about it?’. It is a hard question for each of us to answer I suppose, I don’t really have one formulated fir myself yet. Best I can tell, we have to start with ourselves, and I still have some work there.

The whole point of the reflection I suppose is that what is information without the appropriate background, historical context, can it still be used as efficiently? Is it still relevant? Is need driving relevancy of information? I suppose that is just another way to say for information to be useful, you need to want it, you need to be able to understand it. So the only way for a search engine to deliver what we are looking for, it needs to understand what we know and what we are looking for. Are we the sum of our knowledge? Even that one is a bit too deep for me. But for the sake of argument, that would mean the search engine would have to know me to be able to give me an efficient result. Ouch.

Was supposed to be a reflection on the times, I got distracted :). Without going into politics, I am not sure there ever was a US president who had so many issues to resolve, I wish him well.

Philosophy and Education

In the French curriculum I followed, when I was 17 I had to take a year of a philosophy course. One hour a week or something and it was in the final exams (A levels, bachelor's degree, ... Anyway the one you take when you are 18 and kind of decides what you will be doing next).

I was never very literary, I was Mr logical; loved math, kind of saw the point of physics, liked biology but the rest was pretty much background noise. I could barely write essays, I was either pretty good or really bad (mostly bad of course) and never quite understood the difference between the good ones and the bad ones. I have been known, not by many, to write poetry when in love. I could actually spontaneously rhyme when in love, of course this went all away once I moved to a non French speaking country. I did not understand the  point of philosophy. It very seemed to be idle debating about something, anything really, that most people already had an opinion about. What should I write 3 pages of something when I can explain my opinions in a few sentences.

For the exam I had something like, who is the best person to really know who I am. I did badly. But the question stayed with me for a very long time, I hate to loose I suppose. This question, and this alone, taught me more about philosophy than all the courses (not that many really) that we took.
At the time, my view of the world was very simple. I did not understand that it called for a definition of who or what I am. I was the sum of my experiences therefore I am the best person to know who I am. Pretty silly question when you make this assumption. Who else knows about all the experiences I have been through. I can see now why I did not do so well.
Maybe now I am more capable of fooling myself I know more than I used to. I start asking myself the kind of questions like:

• Am I the sum of my experiences or am I what I made of them?
• Can 2 people with the same experiences have the same personality or even be the same person?
• Which brings us to can 2 different people really have the same experiences?

I am starting to understand the question when a tree falls but no-one sees/hears it, is it still falling? Although my favorite one is if a man says something and no women hears him, is he still wrong? I can see how it is hard to prove/disprove whether the external world is what we perceived it to be through imperfect interpretation of language and senses that are consistently filtering out information, otherwise there would be too much to process. I am still not sure about what is the sound of a one hand clap? Maybe I will have a better idea about that one within the next 10 years or so.

I am not sure I am a converted yet, I still have a very pragmatic approach to the whole thing. I am not sure trying to prove the existence of God or that the external world might not be what my experience of it tells me it is. In the end of the day, we can only do what seems to make sense at the time we do it.
I have some sympathy for the Buddhist approach, quite your mind and you will be able to know yourself. I believe that when we are quiet and separated from the outside influence, we are mostly good (without having the need to define what it means). I am hoping we are all good, but I am nowhere near that special place, so I am not sure.

Finally I am hoping that in the future, religion, philosophy, biology and philosophy will merge into one know it all discipline. I'd rather not be there when it happens though. I enjoy having a little mystery in my life and not knowing everything there is to know. Hopefully it is not possible and it is just something to strive for and that you can never reach. On the other hand, one can hope that a better understanding of the human nature would lead to a better world. So I suppose I am all in favor of philosophy after all. I just wished it had been presented a little bit better when was was younger.